Still Plenty To Enjoy After All These Years

Movies - REVIEW - `La Dolce Vita'

October 15, 2004|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

Forty years on, and that overused, devalued phrase "a movie masterpiece" still applies to La Dolce Vita. Federico Fellini's languorous 1960 exploration of romantic disconnection and celebrity worship -- the most rewarding three hours you will ever spend reading Italian subtitles -- now seems like both a scrapbook from a forgotten age and a prophecy of the world to come.

The film, re-released in theaters to help promote its debut on DVD, is a rambling, poignant gambol through the Roman night with a man who knew those nights too well. Marcello Mastroianni is Marcello, the playboy gossip columnist who flits from press conference to event to "happening," and from bed to bed. He sees "the sweet life" of the film's title. He lives it. And through him, we see how empty it can be.

Mixing with intellectuals and playboys, hookers and homosexuals, Marcello listens to and watches and uses them all.

And if this is the life the world is reaching for, of easy sex, fame, misspent wealth and endless parties, is this all there is?

Maybe happiness lies in a life with the promiscuous Maddelena (Anouk Aimee). Maybe it comes from the fame that his journalism wins him. Or maybe it's just out of reach, in the country town where he tries to write, meets a rural "Umbrian angel," and considers the literary career he abandoned for the scandal sheets.

Then there is the elusive Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), a dizzy, vivacious movie star, in town and out of reach. Marcello and the first Paparazzo -- his friend, the freelance photographer -- chase her and get into her business. Paparazzo and his colleagues want her picture doing something scandalous. Marcello just wants her.

Marcello sees the rich, the famous and the infamous as the hollow, soulless shells so many of them are. And as he fires up another cigarette, dons his chic sunglasses and roars around Rome in his Triumph convertible, he tries his darndest to be one of them.

He drives himself into a confused depression and his girlfriend to attempted suicide. He sinks lower and lower until he -- and we -- reach a revelation.

But before he does, he takes part in one of the most famous images in film history -- the voluptuous Ekberg's dip in the Trevi fountain.

The film is dated in its lustrous black and white look -- and in the way women are slapped by men who act as if they need to be brought to their senses. But much of La Dolce Vita is timeless. It's a comic, cutting and prophetic poem to Rome, movie stars, gossip and the lifestyles we have hungered to know more about ever since the first "celebrity." It made Fellini and his star legends and secured their places in film history.

Mastronianni was Fellini's alter ego, and the sense of ennui that the great director had by the time that this, his greatest film, came about is palpable. His confusion about women and man's place in the universe and religion and politics and show business and art -- big ideas and obsessions -- would work themselves out in more thoroughly in his 81/2 (1963).

Sexual and professional dissipation never seemed so attractive as it did in La Dolce Vita. Maybe it wasn't the sweetest life, and maybe the sweet life isn't all it is cracked up to be. But they certainly made it look cool.